“Why not have a high-tech company in Michigan?”

This is the question Bill Hamilton asks of those incredulous of the possibilities of success of a software company based in Okemos, MI. Hamilton, an Ann Arbor native, started TechSmith in 1988, and the company, best known for its screen-capture software, has weathered the challenges of a startup from the rust belt state.

“We see a lot of positives being here in Michigan,” Hamilton said in an interview last week. “The one problem we have is more of a psychological problem than a real one. And that is when we go to recruit people from outside of Michigan, the press is so bad on Michigan right now, so we get people who have a lot of pause.”

Working in a state known more for blight than innovation hasn’t seemed to hold TechSmith back. Hamilton expects the company will end the year with about $41 million in sales.

TechSmith first introduced its flagship product, Snagit, in 1991. And since then, the technology—which allows users to take a shot of their PC screen, save the snapshot, manipulate it, and share it with others—has taken off. But it hasn’t always been steady success for Hamilton and the company. TechSmith has faced challenges common to many startups. The company developed a variety of products, some commercially successful, some not, before finding a viable business model.

Hamilton and a business partner co-founded TechSmith in February 1988, knowing they wanted to develop and sell software products, but they had to start by focusing most of their time on consulting, instead of developing software. “Mostly what we did was help people get PCs to talk to many computers and mainframes,” he said. “We did that for some time. It was partly to put food on the table, but it was also partly to understand what people were looking for.”

After the founders consulted for a few years on the side, they were able to develop their first product—a gateway for local area networks to connect to databases—and were selling it with some success. But an unfortunate partnership stalled the company’s trajectory, at least temporarily. “I made a bad business decision and got into a business relationship with a company that turned out we didn’t have a level of compatibility that we thought,” Hamilton said.

As part of the “divorce,” as Hamilton calls it, TechSmith gave the other company the technology for local network interfaces and was forced to start from scratch, about seven years after the … Next Page »

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Updated: A number of information-hungry attendees of our cloud computing event came up to me during and after the event to request that we post speaker slides. Only about half the speakers actually used slides, and for various reasons they weren’t always comfortable with posting them. But a few—starting with former IBM executive Irving Wladawsky-Berger and Sun Microsystems VP Rich Zippel—are willing to share their slides. So is Microsoft’s Scott Jamison, who recently sent in his as well, prompting us to update this post.

The keynote by Wladawsky-Berger, chairman emeritus of the IBM Academy of Technology, took us back to pre-Cambrian explosion days all the way up to the present—and then looked into the future—so it’s a great one to set the stage. Zippel, Vice President of Technology in Sun’s Chief Technologist’s Office, looked at Project Caroline, an attempt by his company at creating a new infrastructure for cloud computing. Meanwhile, Jamison, Director, Enterprise Architecture, Microsoft Northeast Enterprise Group, told how his company views the cloud—basically as another market or avenue for it to offer its software.

We’re still trying to round up a few other speaker slides and will add to this post as more permissions (and selections) come in. But in the meantime, here is Irving’s presentation, Cloud Computing and the Coming IT Cambrian Explosion.

Rich’s presentation is here.

Scott’s slides are here.

In case you missed it, photos of the event, held in Akamai’s headquarters, are here. And my notes (yes, some say extensive notes) on the event are here.

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A 2001 New Yorker essay entitled “Absolute PowerPoint” contained the stunning claim that over 30 million PowerPoint presentations were being given every day. The article attributed this statistic to Microsoft; it did not say how the company gathered the data. But whatever the actual prevalence of PowerPoint in 2001, it’s surely even greater now, given that many more people own laptops today than seven years ago. In fact, PowerPoint has become such a universal medium that it wouldn’t be surprising to see great fields of PowerPoint presentations blooming on the Web, alongside other forms of user-generated content.

And that’s just what is happening. BrainShark of Waltham, MA, today officially opened the world’s first repository for ready-made business presentations, complete with audio narration. Some of the presentations are free; others cost $15 to $50. It’s like YouTube meets Amazon for PowerPoint.

BrainShark, a nine-year-old, 110-employee company that’s raised a total of $23 million in funding from the likes of Flagship Ventures, Ticonderoga Capital, SI Ventures, and Citizens Capital, is known mainly for software that allows users (mainly executives at the large companies that subscribe to the service) to upload PowerPoint presentations to a Web-based authoring tool, then record an audio track over the telephone. Customers or employees can then access the finished presentations online as part of marketing, training, or “e-learning” campaigns. Over 700 companies use the service, including more than a third of the Fortune 100, according to BrainShark CEO Joe Gustafson.

But the company recently realized that there might be demand for a PowerPoint exchange—somewhere a company’s HR executives could go, for example, to find a pre-made but customizable presentation on workplace sexual harassment reporting policies, rather than having to build one from scratch. PowerPoint has long included an “AutoContent Wizard” that provides templates for specific situations such as “Employee Orientation,” “Project Post-Mortem,” and even “Communicating Bad News.” And the New Yorker exaggerated only slightly in saying that these templates are “so close to finished presentations you barely need to do more than add your company logo.” But not even the wizards at Microsoft can think of every business scenario in advance. Enough of the business world’s collective wisdom is now embedded in PowerPoint files (and perhaps nowhere else) that BrainShark believes the time has come for a rich marketplace for presentations.

“A couple of things happened recently that caused us to go to market with a content network,” says Gustafson. “The first is we are just a big enough company now to expand into an additional line of business. Also, in the marketplace you’ve got a confluence of things: a greater interest in multimedia generated by YouTube; a greater interest in user-generated content with blogging and Wikipedia; and people are more and more comfortable accessing information online. And over the years we’ve had customers come to us and say, ‘We bought BrainShark to create our own proprietary content, but we’re often creating content that we could probably buy off the shelves, as long as we could customize 10 or 20 percent of it to fit our needs.’ So we think the whole e-learning market is ripe for being turned on its head.”

Here’s how it works—starting with BrainShark’s existing presentation-authoring process, as explained by Gustafson: “You give us your PowerPoint file and it’s automatically uploaded to our secure servers. We process it to our format, and then we come back to your screen with a telephone number that you dial and enter a secure password. The automated attendant says, ‘To start recording, press this key,’ and from then on your phone is in control over your PC browser. You see your first slide in front of you. Just like with voice mail, you add some dialogue to that slide. Then you press a key on go on to Slide 2. You can stop, listen, edit, delete, and re-record. When you hang up the phone, we process it, put the audio file together with the visuals, and combine it into a link to a regular URL. Anyone who goes to that URL can play back that content on any system from any browser.”

What’s new is the BrainShark Content Network. Say you’re an expert on Sarbanes-Oxley reporting regulations. After registering with BrainShark as an author (which involves some pre-screening, meaning the network isn’t strictly equivalent to YouTube and other user-generated content sites), you can … Next Page »

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